May 14, 2011

Well, I'm not feeling lucky with Google this week. I'd like to like the cloud, though. You know, one reason that I've stayed on Blogger is that I want my archive to be around after I'm dead. I trust Google to continue on indefinitely, and because Blogger doesn't demand payments, I wasn't worried about my blog going away when I'm not here anymore to pay my bills.

So like, Google had become an idea of the afterlife. And now, they're all about the cloud. It's becoming so God-ish. Google as God. It's a mystical experience we are having here in the world, getting absorbed into The Whole.

I know that Althouse gets lots of link love from Instapundit, but I've never been all that impressed with her. She'll talk a good game about not being a liberal, but if you read her blog long enough you can tell that she's still emotionally wedded to the Democrats.

So no matter what complaints she has about the Democratic candidate, I doubt she'll ever be able to bring herself to vote for a <shudder> conservative. Plus she tends to be rather thin-skinned and quick to anger.

Meh.

Heh.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some advise me to switch to Catholicism and Don't Tread 2012 points to...

I'm reminded of a science fiction story where someone becomes telepathic and is able to hear all the real thoughts people have about her. She can't deal with knowing what people really think.

I didn't quite buy the premise of the story; that she would be driven mad.

I figured that only a little thought would mean an understanding that the weight of a critical thought was far less than the weight of a criticism that seemed necessary to express directly.

And all of a sudden I had this picture of the internet as a place where the line between what is important enough to be expressed to a person is mixed up with the milder sorts of thoughts that are observations of no particular weight. And it reminded me of that story about telepathy.

On the one hand am curious as to *which* blogs experienced the most trouble. Can one discern a pattern in terms of politics? Throw in the now infamous nitecruzr rudeness although it seems pretty clear he was being a royal jerk and not truly representing Google itself - despite Google's well known political leanings.

On the other hand am genuinely interested in the technical issues. I have a PT job taking care of computers and network. Get Linux Journal. Read - and don't entirely understand - articles about different kinds of databases. Have installed and run several database driven sites on my own web space.

Let's assume - in fact we don't have to this is pretty well known - that Althouse is one of the biggest Blogspot blogs in terms of *content* and *traffic*. Let's also assume that Blogspot/Google are using a database of some sort to hold all that content. Don't databases start getting a little shaky at certain sizes? Although surely Blogspot/Google use only the most robust/scalable db's and it seems unlikely that even the size/popularity of Althouse could have crashed the db.

"CASE STUDY" ... It's the way advanced college students learn to study businesses.

Besides listing the company's flaws, it tries to correct the problems.

Google? Oh, boy! They have an ad out today trying to get businesses to put all their services & accounting ON LINE! Then, you saw the blow up, here. Plus, Glenn Reynolds has added his links, today, too.

It may be a good time to sell the stock.

You know, there's a good chance "blogger" will eat this comment. And, it won't post. Just say'in. (While I still copy my copy before I hit the send button. A habit Blogger got me into months, and months, ago.

" Don't databases start getting a little shaky at certain sizes? Although surely Blogspot/Google use only the most robust/scalable db's and it seems unlikely that even the size/popularity of Althouse could have crashed the db."

Yes, I assumed that the problems that others were experiencing could have manifested themselves differently on my blog because of its size. I have had other problems where things don't work because of the size. For example, in "manage posts" when I do a search, it only goes back about a year, instead of pulling up posts from all the years. That loss of functionality really affects things I want to be able to do. If I click on a tag, I don't get the stuff going all the way back.

And at one point, the blog just stopped displaying the whole month if you clicked on a month in the archive.

I think Google doesn't kick you out when you are too big, but they really aren't oriented to working right for you. You just get the idea you're better off leaving (or you don't). It's like some marriages. One person wants the breakup, but doesn't openly ask for it, and the other one eventually leaves.

My issue with "free" services is that they are only there while they make sense to the provider. A change in management philosophy or profitability and "poof" it's gone. No contractual responsibility, no recourse. Which is not to say "don't use them" but it is definitely to say "be prepared for them to disappear at any time."

In the modern world, some people forget that human beings do not die in the order that they were born, so be careful who you say that to.

Yes, it's a crapshoot.

That's why, in my mind, one should have as many children as possible.

I failed to take my own advice, producing only two daughters. I should have kept going until I had six children. Because, now, I have a shortage of grandchildren. Only one, but perhaps some more on the way. One of my sisters already has five grandchildren!

You have sinned? Oh, come on. That's a little self-centered, don't you think?

It was likely a technical problem. Even if your blog was taken down due to a campaign by your enemies to report your blog as "abusive", that's still a technical problem. It's also unlikely, considering all the other problems that Blogger had yesterday.

You want a blog platform that will stand up to any sort of traffic and remain on the Internet in perpetuity? That's a big demand and you shouldn't be surprised that it isn't available for free. You get what you pay for.

Besides, do you really think that anyone is going to care all that much about your posts 10 years on? 20 years on? Blogging on the matters of the day is not a format that ages well.

"I failed to take my own advice, producing only two daughters. I should have kept going until I had six children. Because, now, I have a shortage of grandchildren. Only one, but perhaps some more on the way. One of my sisters already has five grandchildren!"

It's not enough to have children (and to keep them alive). You must also cause them to want to have children. We forget that! We teach them to love freedom and personal fulfillment.

"I failed to take my own advice, producing only two daughters. I should have kept going until I had six children. Because, now, I have a shortage of grandchildren. Only one, but perhaps some more on the way. One of my sisters already has five grandchildren!"

It's not enough to have children (and to keep them alive). You must also cause them to want to have children. We forget that! We teach them to love freedom and personal fulfillment.

Why not do both? Freedom and personal fulfillment are good things, but, in the way this society has framed them, are sometimes imbued with an Obamanesque narcissism.

Perpetuating the race, as we are finding out, is still necessary and fulfillment can be had in raising a family as much as anything else.

The last few years have shown us counting on the government to protect us is a losing proposition.

So you just pay a lot for stuff and it's always great? I never noticed that. I'm getting plenty of email warning me away from this or that company. You can pay and it will still be bad. The very fact that people think "You get what you pay for" encourages companies to price high and take advantage of people. Google has an extremely valuable *reputation* to defend. That is a powerful motivator. Google has many billions of dollars at stake. It's motivated by *its money" and it is making much more money than these lesser companies.

Google does indeed have a "reputation" to uphold but in the startlingly large space of the cyber universe the contretemps surrounding a single blog, or indeed every blog, will have zero consequences. Thus do we fear the too large, the keepers of our secrets, our government, the ponderous but dangerous corporate world.

Google has an extremely valuable *reputation* to defend. That is a powerful motivator. Google has many billions of dollars at stake. It's motivated by *its money" and it is making much more money than these lesser companies.

Well, look what happened when you turned to Google for help. The front-line Google Help person trashed you and didn't give a shit about Google's reputation or their billions of dollars at stake. Many of your posts and comments are still missing, right? And this isn't an isolated incident; Blogger has problems *all the time*.

How do the developers at Google justify this? They think in silly, old-fashioned aphorisms: You don't pay for it, so Google need not provide professional front-line support, nor phone help, nor need they be diligent in solving your problem. Your idea that they are concerned about their reputation and their money is only theoretical.

Catholic tradition may in general be superior to that of the boneheaded WASP/mormonic/zionists but that's only an aggregated mean. Many individual catholics may be as irrational and tasteless as a baptick (ie, see shouting TomRom's obscene rants for example), and for that matter most don't know Aristotle from Apollo. But unlike the WASP-zombies they do have some great architecture and ahht.

You know, I understand the "I'd like my archive to hang around" thing, but I have to think trusting to a big corporation to maintain a business strategy for more than about 15 minutes is the last way to do that.

Nothing is more typical in internetopia than for Conglomerate X to buy Service Y and then decide five minutes later that it no longer fits with its corporate strategy and and to kill it. (The one I fear is that Flickr, which under Yahoo keeps moving away from being user friendly and toward being Yahoo corporate synergy friendly, will get so screwed up that it won't do what I pay it to do, and I'll have to relink a few billion photos on my blog.)

I don't know the answer to this question, but trusting that Google will want to run Blogspot forever doesn't seem like it to me.

What is the benefit of the cloud? Why would I possibly want to use it? Anytime I leave my office I have my laptop with me. It will have been synchronized with my office computer in the past 24 hours so will have everything I have. That includes all e-mail going back to the mid 90s.

Why would putting it in the cloud be of any benefit?

The only possible benefit is offsite backup but I would never use Google for that.

I ask this knowing what the cloud is having heard and read many discussions of it. I wind up feeling that I am missing something. I just don't see any possible benefit to giving someone else any control over my stuff.

If you just want to cruise the web, the Google computer-like machine is excellent. I have one from the beta test, and it's the most used computer in the house. Boots and comes out of hibernation faster than you can probably imagine and has a real keyboard unlike the iPad. The battery seems to last forever.

Freeman has it pegged. This device is a toy and not a tool. It's good for cruising the web but not for actual computing. Don't expect to go anywhere you need a password or to write and store anything that is more meaningful than a simple happy birthday to a relative.

I'm not thrilled that Google powers my phone. I don't trust them one iota. And, given their Democratic propensity, why don't Republicans hold massive hearings to make them explain their lack of support for privacy and the like?

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